TL;DR: we are conducting an online survey to better understand the global state and impact of Fortran and the Fortran community. We intend to make the results of the survey available to the entire community. The survey is available here. We’d be delighted if you would complete the survey. It should take about 20 minutes to complete. The survey will close end of day on 12 February 2026 (UK time).
Please circulate this invitation to others who you think would be relevant, outside of fortran-lang.
The detail
As far as we are aware, no comparable survey has been conducted on/with the Fortran community. We hope the results of the survey will help the global Fortran community to better understand itself, and also help those outside the community - e.g., other parts of the software industry, funders, policy-makers etc. - to also better understand the global Fortran community.
We’d like as large a response as possible to increase the credibility of the results.
We’re looking for healthy, professional adults who work with Fortran codebases to complete the survey.
We intend to make the results publicly available. Once ‘sanitised’, we intend to make the data available too.
We thank several people from the Fortran community for piloting a version of this survey. Their input helped us to better focus the survey.
We appreciate that there may be some questions in the survey that Fortran purists might disagree with. We are trying to get the pragmatic balance right.
Further information on the survey is available here, including Participant Information Sheet and a reference copy of the Informed Consent (which is part of the online form as well).
If you would like to discuss the survey, please contact the Chief Investigator: Prof. Austen Rainer (a.rainer@qub.ac.uk)
Thanks
Austen, on behalf of wider the investigative team, comprising Dr Andrew Brown (Queen’s University Belfast), and Dr Rebecca Taylor and Prof Simon Hettrick (both at University of Southampton).
Turns out there was a gremlin in the link to further information (there’s a one word explanation: “Microsoft” ). I am hoping that the following link will work:
I’ve included a PDF printout of the survey form in the folder linked to above, so that people can review the questions before deciding whether to participate in the survey. The PDF will make the survey look (a lot) longer than it actually is because of the way the PDF renders drop-down answers. I’ve amended the opening preamble of the online form to refer to the PDF too.
I’ve also simplified the title of the survey (“…Fortran 2025” might be misconstrued as Fortran revision 2025!), and included directly into the form the link to the participant information sheet and other documentation, for more direct access.
A further two clarifications (and thanks to @certik for bringing these to my attention): when I wrote, “We’re looking for healthy, professional adults”, this was influenced by the requirements of the ethics committee who approved the study, e.g., any involvement with, say, vulnerable adults raises additional issues with ethics. I therefore felt obliged to make that clear.
Then, when I wrote “professional”, we don’t mean to restrict this survey to only those who are paid (employed). We want this to be encompassing to include, for example, open source developers and volunteers.
Apologies, and thank you again to those who are bringing these items to my attention. And please do complete the survey. We want this to be a valuable survey for the global Fortran community.
This afternoon, @abrown41 and I briefly reviewed the responses received so far to the Fortran survey. Independent of the number of people responding (which is itself encouraging) we were particularly impressed with both the quantity and the high quality of the qualitative responses that participants have been making in the survey. Writing such responses takes time and attention. Respondents don’t have to write these things: they are choosing too. For Andrew and me, that’s an indication of the care that people are giving to this survey and, by implication, the care they have for the community.
suggests an interesting question – how many Fortran projects are stand-alone, how many have a main program written in Fortran but incorporate other languages, and how many are libraries called from other languages. Personally I would find the answer informative. I do not see that particular line of inquiry in the survey though.
Thanks for your comment, @urbanjost , and the page you link to, which is interesting. When designing the survey, we were conscious of the time it would take for people to complete the survey, and therefore needed to balance comprehensiveness in data collection with time and, by implication, with completion rates.
When it comes to interpreting the responses from the survey, information like the page you have shared, as well as comments we have directly received from others and those included in the survey responses themselves, will help us to make what I hope will be more valid interpretations, including recognising there are issues we have not asked about.
There is one question in the survey (Q12) which asks, “What other languages are used in, or with, the codebase?“. That question seems to be going in the direction you are referring, since the presence of multiple languages implies some kind of interoperability in the system. But of course, we have not asked questions about how many other languages, or the proportion of Fortran code to non-Fortran code, or the relationship between the code written in different languages, so can’t directly pursue the line of enquiry you raise with the survey.
We must, of course, wait for the complete data from the survey: accepting that, the responses we have received so far suggest there are some Fortran codebases that are entirely (100%) Fortran, whilst others have some mix of other languages. Some respondents are providing identifying information about their codebases, e.g., a URL to the codebase. This would allow a complementary piece of research to look at interoperability.
Since that question will let you identify what is 100% Fortran it will shed more light on what I was asking, as you pointed out nicely. I missed that. Looking forward to seeing the results of your survey.
Final call . The survey closes on 12 Feb. If you’d like to complete the survey and have not done so yet, there’s still a couple of days remaining. We have 123 responses so far, which I am personally very pleased about.
Thank you to those who have completed the survey already.
). I am hoping that the following link will work:
Thank you.
. The survey closes on 12 Feb. If you’d like to complete the survey and have not done so yet, there’s still a couple of days remaining. We have 123 responses so far, which I am personally very pleased about.